These Faces I've Shorn

I find myself returning to it sometimes, this corridor of names, the faces I've worn. Disowned and shed at last.
I thought the past wouldn't allow me to return, except doors have hinges, and with patience and spit, I've learned to work my way around.
The world opens if you hold the lotus for a while. Or eat, so taught, built a child of clay and dust inside this inherited pantheon.

My face all scarry and pock-marked.

It's not mine for knowing, yet I reckon I'd dare walk outside our house, if I was forced to wear over my eye a pirate patch.
Could I meet the world with one eye missing? Would or Wotan. Do I imagine myself wise in all the wealth I've been permitted to keep?
Creep up the staircase, my pregnant belly cradled inside the ladle of grave, soft hands. Misbelong of past mistaken authorities.

I have no right to long for these shores, yet I do, and tear it to pieces, and bury under-mound.
Hold inside my mouth the memory of twin blackcap.
Sister-warn not to bury my nose inside the armpits of giants, but the hour inside me grows late, and I crave the sweat of man.
My loss, whose dice. Miss the freedom of whistling along dead-empty highways. The sea-salt road. e.e. cummings for the first time, not best time.

I've read all these words before. Many times. I'm greedy, think myself fox-like when I cower under the TV with my gray-patch fur and my nibble of stinky cheese.
Defy the rules of games I've built, char my bellyache on altars never warranted. When it ain't blood, it's shit, and I whimper,
Forgotten child under the kitchen-door table, there's no one to tell I've broken it. And besides, there's no how.

Bloody Mary, on a mat of rage and bliss, died, mistaking her tumors for foul-smelling babies,
And if I don't wean my grip off these crack-wobble masks, some day some way, so will I.